1st Edition

Women Photographers of the Pacific World, 1857–1930

By Anne Maxwell Copyright 2020
    348 Pages 60 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    348 Pages 60 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This is the first book to examine the lives and works of women photographers active in the settler colonial nations of the Pacific Rim from 1857–1930. The few histories of women’s photography that have been written so far have been confined to developments in Britain, France, Germany and the USA, and have overwhelmingly focused on artistic photography, ignoring the whole area of commercial photography. Taking 12 case studies as representative of the many women who entered the profession between 1857 and 1930, this book deals with both early 20th-century artistic and ethnographic photography in the region and 19th-century commercial photography. In addition to asking how female photographers coped with the pressure of being women in a male-dominated profession, what was new about the techniques and methods they deployed, and the kinds of artistic visions they brought to bear on their subjects, it breaks new ground by asking how they responded as photographers to the on-going decimation and displacement of indigenous peoples as white settlement and capitalism became ever more entrenched across the new world territories of the Pacific Rim, and photography more influenced by the international art movements of Pictorialism and Modernism.

    1. Introduction

    Part One: The First Settler Women Photographers

    Introduction to Part One

    2. Elizabeth Withington, Pioneering Professional

    3. Mrs Rudolph’s Gallery

    4. The Maori Portraits of Elizabeth Pulman

    Part Two: Women Photographers of the Late Nineteenth Century

    Introduction to Part Two

    5. The Imaginative World of Hannah Maynard

    6. The Stylish Portraits of Abigail Cardozo

    7. Margaret White’s Challenge to Settler Colonialism

    Part Three: Ethnographic Pictorialists, 1903-1930

    Introduction to Part Three

    8. Celebrating Racial Hybridity: Caroline Gurrey’s Portraits of Hawai’ian Children

    9. Laura Adams Armer in Navajo Land

    10. Emma Freeman: Between Romance and Ethnography

    Part Four: The Persistence of Pictorialism

    Introduction to Part Four

    11. The Celebrity Portraits of May and Mina Moore

    12. Anne Brigman and the Power of Creativity

    13. Una Garlick and the New Zealand Picturesque

    14. Conclusion: Histories, Canons and Legacies

    Biography

    Anne Maxwell is Associate Professor in the English and Theatre Program in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She has published numerous articles and essays on colonial and postcolonial literature and colonial photography. Her other books are Colonial Photography and Exhibitions (2000), Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics (2008) and Shifting Focus: Colonial Australian Photography, 1860-1920 (2015).